What makes products trendy: Introducing an innovation adoption model

Abstract

Here we propose and study a new model of innovation adoption, IA. Our hypothesis is that individuals’ decisions regarding the purchase of a new product, are driven by the perceived type of adoption trend. Our assumptions split adopters into four groups, Innovators, Early Adopters, Majority, and Laggards, based on their innovativeness, and assign particular preferences for various adoption trends based on their psychological profile. We have built several mathematical models to test our hypothesis and generated forecasts for retail sales of products sold in a supermarket chain in Poland. The performance in sales forecasting of our IA model, points to evidence of customers’ behavior as described by our hypotheses, and the usefulness in quantifying psychological behavior in a general social context of innovation.